What is a tablet

Tablets are portable touchscreen devices offering a middle ground between Laptops and Smartphones. They are most suitable for music, movies or surfing the web. Popular Tablets include the iPad, Samsung Galaxy Note, Blackberry Playbook and the new Windows 8 tablets. An intuitive Multi-Touch system lets you use your fingers to navigate the screen fluidly and naturally, easily accessing and controlling applications and Tablet functions.

Why buy one?

Tablets are simple and intuitive. While not ideal work devices, they can start in seconds and are invaluable for travel, daily correspondence and entertainment applications like surfing the web and watching movies.

Which operating systems do they use?

The most popular Tablet operating systems are Googles Android, Apples iOS and Microsofts Windows 8.

Android Tablets include various Smartphones, the Samsung Galaxy , Motorola Xoom, Archos Arnova and others. They feature excellent built-in video and music players and a fast, fully-functional web browser. Owners of iPads, iPhones or iPods will encounter Apple’s iOS, which offers simple, intuitive usage and gives access to the Apple App Store. This Operating System also enables your Tablet to interact with your Mac so that files can be shared between devices. Owners of iPads, iPhones or iPods will encounter Apple’s iOS, which offers simple, intuitive usage and gives access to the iOS app store. This Operating System also enables your Tablet to interact with your Mac so that files can be shared between devices.

Windows 8 will feature on a range of new tablets and is designed for touchscreen use. Although similar to previous versions of Windows, it offers a simpler, more visually interactive system with all your news feeds and favourite apps on the home page.

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First Impressions Windows Surface Tablet

For unrelated reasons, my wife and I were near a Microsoft store today and we took the opportunity to drop by and check out the Windows Surface Tablets. Given my experience with Windows 8 Pro recently I expected to be underwhelmed. Instead we both came away pretty impressed.

The tablets themselves dont look anything special. The kickstands are very nice, but if that was all I wouldnt be impressed. The keyboards, however, are amazing. The thin keyboard is nice enough that you can actually touch-type on them with no errors. Its nothing like typing on a touch-screen. Even without haptic or audible feedback I could type at about half my normal speed, which is still at least 50% faster than a typical touchscreen.

Switch-over to the thicker keyboard, however, and my typing speed went up dramatically, to about 95% of the speed as the Thinkpad X201s. The Thinkpads got 2 extra inches, so you can see why Im impressed. This is the first tablet that I would consider as a decent laptop substitute!

While I was unimpressed by Metro on desktop, on the tablet it shines. You can treat it like any other tablet for viewing video, or whatever. But click on Microsoft Word, and the tablet UI fades and you get a windows UI. You can bring up Internet Explorer, and cut and paste to your hearts content as though you were on a laptop. You could watch youtube on half the screen while writing in the other half. A writer could actually get decent work done on this! The machine even has a microSD slot and a full USB slot as well as a display port slot, which means you can actually do laptop-y things with it, like post-process photos from a real digital camera (not the fake stuff that comes on tablets).

The big deficiencies (and these would get me to wait for the Surface Pro) are the lack of applications. Dropbox, for instance, hasnt been ported to Windows RT yet. If you wanted to use Lightroom, Photoshop, or Adobe Premiere Elements, youre out of luck, at least for the foreseeable future. However, all these issues would go away on the Pro version of the tablet, and I could see myself buying one instead of a laptop in the future.

Its never sexy to heap praise on Microsoft, but if youve got an interest in tablets, you should definitely check one out in person before ruling it out. And if Lightroom or Picasa or an equivalent got ported to Windows RT, watch out: this may well become the tablet to get for any serious photographer!

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Acer lconia W510 Tablet Review

A great Windows slate that offers more than your average tablet

The plethora of Windows laptop hybrids on the market is astonishing, and can make choosing a new machine a daunting prospect. The Acer Iconia W510 is a great 10.2-inch Windows 8 Pro tablet that slots neatly into the curent market.

Windows RT devices are affordable and make frugal use of battery power, whereas Intel Core devices running Windows 8 are more powerful, but command much higher prices. The Acer Iconia W510 sets itself apart by running an Intel Atom processor, which is designed to offer the power of a laptop, with the battery of a tablet.

Of course, being a Windows 8 Pro device, this isnt just another slab of circuitry. The Acer Iconia W510 comes with a small detachable keyboard, which clips to the bottom so it can be used as a laptop. The connection is reassuringly strong, which makes the Iconia feel as tough as any laptop out there.

Feather weight

The design follows the Acer Iconia W700 (which we reviewed last issue), and its clad in the same solid-feeling aluminium case, which just oozes style. The build quality is superb - from the solid hinge to the smart finish - but if youre looking for a thin and light tablet that can slip into your bag, it might be wise to look at the Samsung Ativ Tab instead. The Iconia W510 weighs 580g without its keyboard, which isnt bad going, but attaching the keyboard takes it up to 900g, which is a little closer to laptop territory.

So, what do you get in that pretty package? Well, rather than the limited mobile chip you’ll find in your average tablet, you get a 1.8 GHz Intel Atom processor. Its a dual-core offering so you can multi-task, but herein lies the problem. The Atom chip is nowhere near as powerful as the Intel Core varieties youll find on Windows Ultrabooks, and web page rendering and gaming will suffer as a result.

The screen is another major selling point of the Acer Iconia W510, and like the W700, its a Full HD offering. Packing a resolution of 1,920 x 1080, the Acer is perfect for watching a movie or TV show.

The attractive keyboard dock is designed for anyone who wants to compose documents on the move, but there are some severe limitations. Its remarkably cramped, and because all the components are packed into the screen part of this hybrid device, its left feeling unbalanced and top-heavy. The trackpad is a step up from many other hybrids, but theres no multi-touch support. Its also hard to master, with the mouse pointer often skipping about the screen. While it does the job adequately, the Iconia fails to replace the usability of a laptop.

A cramped experience

Windows 8s new Start screen interface is designed for high-resolution touchscreens like this, but its a design that doesnt suit the desktop so well. The high-res display means things appear smaller, and navigating through menus and folders can be difficult. However, thanks to the Start screen, the only time youll need to venture into the desktop view is when you want to access files on something like an external device.

The real benefit of using a low power processor is the battery life, and the issues with the Iconias performance are offset by some fantastic longevity. Acer quotes the Iconia W510 as having 18 hours of battery life. This lofty claim is unlikely to be achieved by anyone working in real-world conditions, but you can certainly enjoy a whole day of light web surfing and have enough juice left to watch a film on your way home. We test tablets rigorously - running a HD movie until the battery fails - and we achieved a score of 310 minutes without the keyboard. To put that score in context, the Sony VAIO Duo 11 lasted just 163 minutes under the same conditions, showing that sacrificing some raw power can have huge benefits for mobile users.

Competant but pricey

What we have here is a Windows 8 tablet thats portable and versatile. However, there is a sticking point. The Acer Iconia W510 retails at £549/$750, which kills any chance of it being an easy choice over a Windows RT system. You can get Microsoft Surface RT for £399/$555 - albeit without a keyboard - and a Windows 8 Ultrabook for just a little more. At this price, the limitations become difficult to overlook.

The Iconia W510 is a well built and versatile Windows tablet. We wouldnt recommend it over a full-size laptop for tasks like serious word processing or image editing, but if you already have a reasonably powerful machine at home and youre looking for a portable companion that does more than your average tablet, then the Acer Iconia W510 could certainly fit your needs.

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